The Stuff That Never Happened (28 page)

“Well,” he says, “you may have had to make the marks, but I think I finally know
why
she had you do it. And trust me, it wasn’t in the interest of feminism.” He ambles across the room and sits down on the couch and sprawls his legs out in front of him and smiles at me. I know this tactic of his: get farther away from me, make me come to him. It’s cat and mouse. But I am too upset.

“She said we had to do it because children’s books were too sexist,” I say. “She gave me a long speech about that. And about power. Men taking away my power.”

“No. That wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was that she didn’t want me to finish my novel, and she knew I was close to finishing it. So she
wanted
the kids to get kicked out of day care. Because if they couldn’t go to day care, then
I
would have to watch them, and I wouldn’t have the time to write my novel while I was on sabbatical. It was very Machiavellian of her. Very Carly-esque, you might say.”

“But, Jeremiah, she didn’t even know about your novel then. Don’t you remember? You kept it a secret. It was
our
secret.”

“She was quite a piece of work,” he says. “She made sure she got things just the way she wanted them.”

Damn it! Doesn’t he remember? He doesn’t even remember the day he started the novel and we sat on the floor together and talked about it, the day he realized that writing a novel was what he most wanted to do. And Carly didn’t know anything about it! It was me. He and I were the ones who figured out that that was what he should be doing. I am suddenly struck by how he seems to admire this view of Carly he’s conjured up. Have we really told ourselves such different stories? We’re now a love story that got started because Carly didn’t want him to write? No, no, no.

I should let it go, but I can’t. “Let me remind you,” I say patiently. I sit down on the edge of the ottoman across the room from him, putting the
Three Bears
book on the coffee table between us. “
I
was the one that Carly asked to watch the twins. Remember that? Since I wasn’t doing art anymore, she thought I should be willing to pay you guys back by taking care of the children. She seemed so angry with me that I wasn’t doing art.”

He smiles and says in a soft, silky voice, leaning forward so close he could reach over and touch me, “Yes! That was Carly for you. She always had opinions about what everybody was supposed to be doing with their lives. But we outsmarted her, didn’t we? She didn’t figure on the fact that there
you
were, not only beautiful and willing to go to bed with me, but also
quite
willing to listen to my stupid-ass prose and even tell me it was wonderful.” His eyes are shining, and he bites his lip and cocks his head. “Annabelle, please just come over here and sit next to me. I can’t get over seeing you here. I never thought this could happen. Us. Together again. Even if it’s only for a short time, I just need to have you near me.”

I shake my head and stay where I am.

“Aw, come on, don’t be mad,” he says. “Okay, let’s just say you’re right. It was
you
she wanted to watch the children. She didn’t know a thing about the novel. Okay? I’ve got it all wrong.”

“No. Forget it. I’m sorry.”

We sit there in silence, and then he says, “Well, I
do
remember the important stuff: you and me chasing each other around the apartment when the kids were napping. And all the close calls we had.” He smiles down at the book, touching it as though it’s a sacred talisman from the past or something. The fucking Holy Grail. I hear the heat come on and a radiator clangs somewhere down the hall, the noises of domestic life. I’m feeling almost faint with such a mixture of feelings—disappointment and lust and also as though something is draining all the hope I’ve been carrying for so many years. I look at him and wonder if I was just one in a series of lovers he might have had during his marriage to Carly, a marriage I now think was always unstoppable. Why hadn’t I seen that at the time?

“I’ve often wondered just what we really meant to each other,” I say slowly.

He looks up and smiles at me, and I think it is a practiced smile, something you might see an actor doing in rehearsal. “You know what I think?” he says softly. “You saved me. I think adrenaline, especially sexual adrenaline, is really a drug that can actually keep people from going off the deep end. You and me—that sex with you might have saved my life.”

“So we’re going to think of it as simply sex?” I say. “I think what you’re really saying is that it was the adrenaline that saved you. It wasn’t really me at all.”

“No, no, no! It
was
you. Why are you taking everything the wrong way? You, Annabelle,
caused
the adrenaline. I’m trying to tell you that you saved me. I mean, I’m still not sure we could have kept it going for a whole
lifetime
, but it was great while it lasted.” He smiles sadly, and he suddenly looks tired, and for the first time since I ran into him, I’m aware of how much older he is now, how really changed he is. He falls silent and then he rubs his hands hard over his face and sighs.

The silence that falls between us seems to demarcate something. I am shocked at how hollow I feel. He gets up and walks to the kitchen, and I watch him leave. He is moving slowly, wearily. I am probably more trouble than he bargained for.
He doesn’t remember how it was
.

This is such a mistake, being here. There’s a noise from the kitchen; he’s rinsing his cup. I remember how he used to put the dirty dishes in the oven, his act of rebellion against Carly’s rules. I suddenly want to get air, to go back outside, to get away from this view of things. When he comes back into the living room, he’s carrying the picture of Carly, holding it out to me, saying something like,
This was taken two days after we found out the cancer had gone into remission. We renewed our vows. She said we had to. I didn’t want to do it, but it was actually quite … moving. I was there for her for the end, the way I should have been all along
.

My blood is beating so loudly in my ears that I can barely take in what he’s saying. What then does he see on my face that makes him come over and touch my cheek? He says, “I’ve made you mad. I’m so sorry, Annabelle. I didn’t mean to hurt you again.”

“It’s okay. It’s just that I thought—I thought that we saw it the same way, and we didn’t,” I say. I look up into his face, which now seems naked with pain. “I just can’t have you calling it adrenaline, when it was love. It
was
love. Big love. And I’ve held on to it all these years, even though I wasn’t ever going to see you again; I thought of you and dreamed of you, and when things were hard for me, I remembered that
you
had loved me, really loved me, and it got me through so much. And now—now you bring me here, you insist that I come, and you’re just trying to act as though we had some toxic chemicals in our blood or something. What you’re saying to me is that it would have been a horrible mistake for us to end up together.”

He smiles at me. His eyes are watering. “No, it wouldn’t have been a mistake,” he says. “We would have worked it out, but it would have hurt so many people. But I missed you, too. I
still
miss you, Annabelle.”

“But not the way I missed you,” I say. “There was such a long time when I wasn’t always so sure I could live without you.” I’m light-headed.

“But you did,” he says. And I have to agree.

He laughs and touches my nose with his index finger, and then we’re staring into each other’s eyes, and I think we’ll probably kiss again, and that maybe we’ll fall together after all and go into his bedroom and throw all his stuff off the bed and take our clothes off and make love one last time. It won’t be the way it was once; hell, it won’t even be what I had hoped for earlier today. But it could still happen, as a piece of theater. I feel myself tip and fall into his eyes, those swimming eyes. And then the electricity just fizzles, and
he’s
the one who manages to resist. The kiss he plants on my nose is one of closure.

“Well,” he says. “We both lived, didn’t we? We have this great past together to look back on. That’s more than most people have. And if I was unkind to you, I’m sorry. I was so fucked up back then. I probably should have been quarantined as a danger to society.”

I detach myself from him. My body temperature seems to have dropped about fifteen degrees. I’m almost shivering. “I’m glad they didn’t quarantine you,” I say. “I’ve loved you so much, throughout everything.”

“But not anymore,” he says.

He’s wrong about that. I have it for him still. It’s over in the corner of my brain now, diminished a bit by time and reality. It’s lost some of its shiny promise. But it’s there.

I let myself kiss him, but I leave without sleeping with him. I have to walk for blocks and blocks before I can admit that I went there hungry for the drama of him, that I had craved that heightened sense of loving and being loved once again. I am so lonely for love. I have to stop walking for a moment and lean up against the warm brick facade of a building, where the sun is beaming down. I watch a homeless man who is calmly waiting, approaching each person who comes by, asking for coins for his little paper cup, and then somehow out of all that—the homeless guy and the people shaking their heads at him and moving on and leaving him there, the warmth of the bricks, the sun shining down—I know that restraint was actually the best thing that could have happened, and that I am going to be all right, and that it’s okay to still love Jeremiah just a little, or even a lot, and yet not do anything about it.

[sixteen]

1980

H
ere’s a crazy thing. When I left the train station that day, I actually thought that Jeremiah might run and catch me, that any moment I’d feel his hand on my shoulder and turn to see him smiling at me. “I’ve changed my mind!” he’d say. “How could I possibly throw all this away?” Or maybe he would say that this had all been just a test—a test of my love.

When it started to get dark, and my arms and legs were aching, I went into a little run-down restaurant in a neighborhood I’d never been to before, and sat at a booth in the back all by myself. This was the first time I had ever been in a restaurant alone, and I sat there in the dimness for a long time, running my fingers along the carved initials in the wooden table. When the waitress came by for the third time, I ordered French fries and tapioca pudding and was surprised a little while later when that was exactly what was brought to me, glistening and gross. My brother had called tapioca “fish-eye pudding” when we were little, just so he could get both my portion and his.

I listened to the conversations of normal people and stared through the faraway windows as the lights flared and faded, red and green blinking on and off, headlights sweeping past. The door opened and closed; clumps of people arrived and departed, in groups, like schools of fish. After a while I noticed they were wet. It was raining. I saw the water rolling down the pane of glass, distorting the neon signs outside, the headlights of the cars. There was a loud clap of thunder, and the lights flickered but stayed on.

Maybe, I thought, I should call Grant. If I called him … if I told him I’d been hallucinating and begged him for forgiveness, would he come and meet me and take me back home? He was probably in such terrible pain right now. We could be in pain together, climb our way out of it by holding on to each other.

But he had said not to come back. There was no way he’d let me get near him again, and who could blame him? I had done an awful thing to him.

After the rain stopped, I dragged my suitcases outside and went to a hotel down the street. I had a bit of money with me; it was almost a surprise to realize that I didn’t need to call anybody I knew and try to explain that I needed a place to sleep. I could stay in a hotel until I figured out what my next move would be.

I slept on starchy white sheets in a drab brown room with the sound of traffic bleating in my ears. The next day, I called my mother from a pay phone in the lobby to tell her what had happened, fully expecting that she’d insist I come back home. She didn’t. She and my father were in the midst of their real divorce by then, and she was falling in love with a new man—“A keeper this time,” she said.

“Oh, baby. You’re going to be just fine,” she said. “Really. I know you are.”

“But I miss Grant,” I said. “I hurt the person who really loved me, and I want you to give me some motherly sympathy.”

She laughed. “People who get married when they’re twenty don’t know what love even is,” she said. “Believe me, this is just part of the growing up you have to do, and I hate to say it, but it’s better you’re doing it now while you’re young than when you get old like me. I married your father at twenty, and it’s taken me twenty-three years to fight my way out of that marriage.”

“Nobody’s mother would say that but you,” I said.

She seemed to consider that. “That’s because I tell you the truth,” she said. “Listen. Here’s what I think you should do: take the summer to find a job you like and have some fun. And if in the fall you want to come back to California, then you should.”

Just before I ran out of money, I got a job as a waitress in a little restaurant downtown, the kind of place where tourists gathered. I made friends with two girls there, Mona and Brianna, and the three of us lived together in Hell’s Kitchen. For a while I felt as though I were actually on an odd vacation, a vacation with a job. We lived on restaurant food and ramen noodles and Diet Coke and Pop-Tarts, and the apartment was filled day and night with music and clutter and drama. We had lots and lots of satisfying drama. Somebody was always having company, and somebody else was having a crisis or a breakup of some sort. I had never seen such an overflow of emotion, or felt so in touch with everything I was feeling.

Nights after our shifts ended we would go to a club they knew, a place with loud, thumping music and a big disco ball that sent light spinning around the walls and floor. We smoked and drank and danced and shared clothes and makeup and food and laughter.

Once—I’ve never admitted this to anyone, not even Magda—I went back to the old apartment, the one I had lived in with Grant, and let myself in with the spare key I’d kept. He was at work, of course. I just wanted to be reminded of him, to touch his things. I looked in the refrigerator at the foods he would eat, I ran my hand over the coffeemaker we’d gotten for a wedding present, and then I went into the bedroom and looked at his shirts hanging in the closet, all neatly in a row. The last thing I did was lie down on his pillow on the bed, the bed of a bad woman. I took my shoes off and lay there with my head smushed into his pillow, smelling him around me.

Before I left, I did the dishes and then I cleaned the bathroom sink and the shower and left the can of cleanser on the countertop. I wanted him to wonder, to try to remember if he’d cleaned it himself. Would he think,
Annabelle was here?
No, certainly not. I thought of writing “I miss you” on the mirror in lipstick, but he would hate that. And he hated me anyway. Why make it worse?

I slipped out and went back home.

After that, I changed my look, started teasing my hair and dressing in sequins and tight pants. I learned to dance. I could carry an armload of hot plates and pour coffee into cups without spilling a drop—and every day my life as Grant’s wife and Jeremiah’s lover seemed to recede farther into the background. The only thing I didn’t seem to be able to master was caring about anybody—not in
that way
, as Grant had once so charmingly put it. Although there were men all over the place, I didn’t have sex. I didn’t want to. The one time I tried to sleep with a guy, I burst into tears as soon as we’d both gotten our clothes off, and he practically made skid marks getting out of the apartment.

And then one day, just as I was beginning to get tired of living that way, Magda called me to say she was coming to New York for an interview with a small publisher who was looking for a graphic designer. She’d graduated—I realized that I, too, would have been done with college by then—and she wanted to get out of California and live on the East Coast.

We had a hysterical reunion after her interview. She was wearing her blond hair in a pageboy and she had on a string of pearls and high heels. She did not look like the person in the dorm who could smoke the most dope without falling over, or who had once stood on my bed in the middle of an acid high and yelled that she was the long-lost love child of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

“Look at you!” I said. “You look like the picture of young womanhood meeting corporate America.”

“And look at
you,”
she said. I was wearing leggings, a bright pink blazer with shoulder pads, and a string of lime green beads, and I had my hair all frizzed up in a side ponytail tied with a man’s tie. I could tell she was making some mental adjustments about me. “You look like an artist, girl!”

“Waitress,” I corrected her. “And perhaps disco queen.”

I showed her around the city and took her to my apartment, where she met Brianna and Mona, who were just getting out of bed. The place smelled like stale cigarettes and old beer. Brianna was heating up some cold pizza, and Mona was searching for the aspirin bottle in a pile of laundry. Magda proclaimed it was just like our old dorm room. We gave her some comfortable clothes to put on and showed her how to use blue eye shadow to greater effect, and she acted like she was cool with everything—but I could see the surprise in her eyes when she looked at me.

When I took her on the subway to get her back to the airport, she nudged me and said, “So which guy are you suffering from the most, Jeremiah or Grant?”

“Neither one,” I said. “And I’m not suffering, either. I’m having fun.”

“No, you’re not. I’ve seen you when you were having fun, and this ain’t the look.”

I stared at the overhead posters on the subway and pretended I hadn’t heard her.

“I don’t think Jeremiah is ever going to come through, but I’m pretty sure you could get Grant back if you really wanted to. I think it’s a good sign that he hasn’t filed for divorce yet.”

“It’s probably just that he’s too busy to find a lawyer.”

“But maybe that’s not the reason. Maybe he’s waiting to see if you come back. You could check it out, you know. What’s the harm in that?”

“The
harm
is that I don’t want to. I’m doing fine without him.”

“All right, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I can’t believe how you’re living! You’re not seriously thinking of keeping this up, are you? You’re just, like, slumming for now, right? Right?”

“Actually, I keep thinking I’m going to go back to California in the fall,” I told her.

“No, no, don’t go back. Stay here with me. We’ll do the city up right,” she said. She patted my leg. “Once I get hired at this place, I’ll get you a job, too, and you can go back to being an artist.”

“But I might not even be an artist anymore. What have I ever really accomplished when it comes to art? Nothing.”

“So what? Do you really think your calling is being a waitress? Is this what you actually want?”

“The other day, I’ll have you know, I carried seven plates at one time.”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a comment,” she said. She looked around appraisingly. I notice she wasn’t wearing the pearls anymore, but her hair was straight and shiny and she hadn’t taken up our suggestions for the blue eye shadow either. “You know, I like this city a lot. I think I’m meant to be here for a while. And who knows? Maybe I was sent here by the universe—or maybe by your mother—to help you get back on the right track.”

“Well, it must be the universe, because I know it wasn’t my mother,” I said. “She thinks I’ve pulled off a brilliant escape act.”

A MONTH later, Magda and I had an apartment together, and I was working at the publishing house as an assistant to the art director, a wonderful man who let me do sketches and who encouraged me, even though what I was supposed to be doing was mostly typing and filing. Magda was a graphic designer who was obviously going places, and she pushed me forward so that I kept getting more illustrating work until finally they promoted me. We were both doing well. Magda had always been more daring than I, alert to opportunities that I never noticed, and even here in New York, she seemed to have an instinct for navigating the system. She made us dress up for work every day and act professional, and she befriended the up-and-coming publishing types, people I would have written off as out of my league, because they were. We went to parties and book launches. We had our nails done. She dated lots of guys and seemed to like it that way. For a while I listlessly went out with a guy named Henry, who Magda said was a dead ringer for Grant but not quite as cute and without the advanced degree. I told her I liked him because he was too shy to do more than kiss me. Once he’d hovered his hand in midair over my breast, perhaps waiting for me to wriggle it into his waiting palm, but when I didn’t, he politely withdrew it. I’d later told Magda that that was what made Henry a perfect companion for me, and she said that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard anybody say.

She had her own problems. She’d gotten involved with a man who wanted to get married, and she and I spent all our free time discussing what was wrong with her that she didn’t want to marry him.

“Why don’t I feel it?” she said one evening. “I mean, he’s nice, he treats me well. He’s going to be rich, his mother likes me, and he wants to go to Paris for our honeymoon. But I just keep thinking—how do I
know
I’ll be able to stand him for the rest of my life?”

“Don’t look at
me,”
I said. “I’m the last person who can advise somebody on this. But I will say that if you’re already thinking you won’t be able to stand him, chances are that’s accurate and you should pay attention.”

“But I
always
think that. In fact, I don’t think there’s anybody in the world I could stand to be with if somebody told me I had to do it for the rest of my life.”

“I kind of liked marriage,” I said. “There’s something really cool that happens … I don’t know … when you have a partner.”

“Really?” she said. “So then, what
did
happen with you and Grant, do you think? I mean, we’ve talked all around this, but we’ve never gotten down to absolute bedrock here. What happened to your marriage? Did you just stop loving him, or did you never really love him in the first place?”

We were cleaning up after dinner—take-out Chinese food, our favorite Sunday-night splurge. It was the night we stayed in and got organized for the week. It was funny: now that she asked me, I could remember so clearly that feeling of being bowled over by Grant. Of thinking that everything he did was funny and dorky but lovable. I thought of his large, capable hands, the way his whole serious face could light up when he was excited, even the way I felt when he’d been gone for a while and I saw him again. The way he fumbled so charmingly when he asked me to marry him. How I felt seeing him at the airport when I came to join him in New York. The safety of being with him and being completely myself, not having to fake it. How he fit with me.